Logistics Blog

Pakistan’s Sindh province has been one of the most severely affected areas by the floods as the Indus River runs through it. In it, the route from Sukkur to Jacobabad has been a significant logistical bottleneck for the emergency response operation. Food assistance could be trucked to Sukkur from the port in Karachi and elsewhere, but the route from Sukkur to Jacobabad was completely cut-off by the floods waters.

A couple of months ago we published a story called Shipping Trucks to Niger, the process of getting borrowed trucks from Malawi to Niger. Since that time, the task of those involved with actually moving food with these trucks has been nothing short of logistics at its best.

Once again, WFP Logistics has put a project into motion that not only proves WFP’s capacity to deliver, but also its capacity to make delivering a faster and more efficient process for the whole humanitarian community, this time for those working in the Horn of Africa.

A new software application doesn't really sound so thrilling, we know. But for our Fleet Management Team the launch of the web-based Fleet Management System (FMS) was truly an exciting achievement. With 13 country offices already using the FMS and all countries where WFP trucks operate scheduled to be linked in by the end of 2010, we persuaded our Strategic Fleet Manager, Jean-Francois “Jeff” Milhaud, into telling us all about the process of building the FMS for WFP, what it does and what it brings to the organisation. Here's what he told us.

When we asked Philippe Martou, our Deputy Chief of Aviation, if he could fill us in on the helicopter operations in Pakistan, we were expecting numbers and runs etc.. What we got was a peek inside what WFPs work and staff are all about. This is what he had to say:

The food crisis in Niger is currently WFP’s biggest concern. National, regional, cross-regional and intercontinental food aid procurements are converging to landlocked Niger to face the new operational demands. Thus, an increased transport capacity to rapidly deliver the incoming aid is a parallel imperative.

Logistics is at the core of WFP operations. Each year, WFP distributes over five million metric tonnes of food and relief cargo, facing the challenge of reaching an average of 100 million beneficiaries across some of the toughest terrain on the planet. Here's how:

The yearly WFP Staff Awards of Merit ceremony was held recently. Among the awards, one is dedicated to logistics: the Tun Myat Award for Excellence in Humanitarian Logistics. This year, Matthew Dee, the WFP Deputy Head of Logistics in Somalia, was chosen.

In today’s fast paced world of technological evolution, it is easy to think that delivering food has become easier. However, in the extreme mountain terrain of Nepal, technology has had no place, at least not until now. Delivering food using yaks and mules along impervious trails and paths through the mountains has been common practice for WFP Logistics, sometimes taking cargo up to three weeks to reach the most remote locations.

In 2006, WFP Logistics embarked on the United Nations Humanitarian Response Depot (UNHRD) network project with the aim of replicating globally the Brindisi rapid response base. The UNHRD Network initiative supports WFP in meeting its corporate goal of being prepared to respond to four large scale emergencies at any given time as well as augmenting the emergency response efforts of UN, International, Governmental and Non-Governmental Organisations.